• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
MENUMENU
MENUMENU
  • Home
  • About
    • Contact Us
    • FlaglerLive Board of Directors
    • Comment Policy
    • Mission Statement
    • Our Values
    • Privacy Policy
  • Live Calendar
  • Submit Obituary
  • Submit an Event
  • Support FlaglerLive
  • Advertise on FlaglerLive (386) 503-3808
  • Search Results

FlaglerLive

No Bull, no Fluff, No Smudges

MENUMENU
  • Flagler
    • Flagler County Commission
    • Beverly Beach
    • Economic Development Council
    • Flagler History
    • Mondex/Daytona North
    • The Hammock
    • Tourist Development Council
  • Palm Coast
    • Palm Coast City Council
    • Palm Coast Crime
  • Bunnell
    • Bunnell City Commission
    • Bunnell Crime
  • Flagler Beach
    • Flagler Beach City Commission
    • Flagler Beach Crime
  • Cops/Courts
    • Circuit & County Court
    • Florida Supreme Court
    • Federal Courts
    • Flagler 911
    • Fire House
    • Flagler County Sheriff
    • Flagler Jail Bookings
    • Traffic Accidents
  • Rights & Liberties
    • Fourth Amendment
    • First Amendment
    • Privacy
    • Second Amendment
    • Seventh Amendment
    • Sixth Amendment
    • Sunshine Law
    • Third Amendment
    • Religion & Beliefs
    • Human Rights
    • Immigration
    • Labor Rights
    • 14th Amendment
    • Civil Rights
  • Schools
    • Adult Education
    • Belle Terre Elementary
    • Buddy Taylor Middle
    • Bunnell Elementary
    • Charter Schools
    • Daytona State College
    • Flagler County School Board
    • Flagler Palm Coast High School
    • Higher Education
    • Imagine School
    • Indian Trails Middle
    • Matanzas High School
    • Old Kings Elementary
    • Rymfire Elementary
    • Stetson University
    • Wadsworth Elementary
    • University of Florida/Florida State
  • Economy
    • Jobs & Unemployment
    • Business & Economy
    • Development & Sprawl
    • Leisure & Tourism
    • Local Business
    • Local Media
    • Real Estate & Development
    • Taxes
  • Commentary
    • The Conversation
    • Pierre Tristam
    • Diane Roberts
    • Guest Columns
    • Byblos
    • Editor's Blog
  • Culture
    • African American Cultural Society
    • Arts in Palm Coast & Flagler
    • Books
    • City Repertory Theatre
    • Flagler Auditorium
    • Flagler Playhouse
    • Flagler Youth Orchestra
    • Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra
    • Palm Coast Arts Foundation
    • Special Events
  • Elections 2024
    • Amendments and Referendums
    • Presidential Election
    • Campaign Finance
    • City Elections
    • Congressional
    • Constitutionals
    • Courts
    • Governor
    • Polls
    • Voting Rights
  • Florida
    • Federal Politics
    • Florida History
    • Florida Legislature
    • Florida Legislature
    • Ron DeSantis
  • Health & Society
    • Flagler County Health Department
    • Ask the Doctor Column
    • Health Care
    • Health Care Business
    • Covid-19
    • Children and Families
    • Medicaid and Medicare
    • Mental Health
    • Poverty
    • Violence
  • All Else
    • Daily Briefing
    • Americana
    • Obituaries
    • News Briefs
    • Weather and Climate
    • Wildlife

Superintendent Lashakia Moore Issues Stronger Apology Over Bunnell Elementary’s Segregationist Assembly

August 23, 2023 | FlaglerLive | 19 Comments

Interim Superintendent LaShakia Moore delivering her statement today, the second in 24 hours.
Interim Superintendent LaShakia Moore delivering her statement today, the second in 24 hours.

For the second time in 24 hours, Interim Flagler Superintendent LaShakia Moore has issued a statement addressing the segregating of Black students in an assembly at Bunnell Elementary last week, where the students were told they were a “problem,” that they had to raise their test scores, that they would be paired off in competition against each other, and that they would be rewarded with fast food if they performed.

Contrary to her written statement on Tuesday, today’s video statement by Moore was more forceful, more clearly recognizing the breadth of the problem–as her statement on Tuesday had not–and twice included an explicit apology.




The superintendent met with faculty, parents and community members in and around Bunnell Elementary in the last 24 hours. The difference between the two statements reflects the substance of those meetings and suggests that the superintendent is rapidly coming to grips with the first and most serious crisis of her young tenure as interim superintendent, a crisis that by today had reached the pages of the Washington Post.

While still evolving, Moore’s response to the crisis–inquiring, then accessible, then visible, and now assertive–illustrates in real time an ability to pivot and change tone to attempt to match the gravity of the issue rather than get entrenched behind a single, defensive message, as organizations with poorly managed messaging or leadership sheathed in skinner skins often do in the face of a crisis. Whether that will be sufficient in the face of parents’ outrage is unclear.

Moore issued the video statement a day before she is to go before the School Board, on Thursday, for a three-hour interview in her candidacy to be the permanent superintendent. (See: “School Board Will Hold 3-Hour Interview of LaShakia Moore for Superintendent, But Hopes You Won’t Attend.”)

On Tuesday, there was no indication that those who led the assembly and the school’s principal would face disciplinary actions. That has changed. A district spokesperson today said that the issue is under investigation by the district’s Office of Professional Standards, and may potentially lead to disciplinary consequences. Moore did not address the investigation in her statement.




“Though no malice was intended in the assembly, it was executed in a way that does not align with the views of Flagler schools, the Flagler County School Board or this community,” Moore said in the video statement, using the familiar terminology used to hedge off potential lawsuits. The assembly gathered exclusively Black 4th and 5th graders, even though low performers are spread across all races and ethnicities. When aggregated as a group, Black test scores are lower than others’.

The assembly did not distinguish between high and low performing Black students, though some in th assembly were high-performing–and were paraded on stage. The faculty members leading the assembly, including the employee in charge of suspensions at the school, told students in the audience that they had to perform like those peers. Though disabled students as a group also have lower scores in general, the assembly did not include disabled students.

“Students should never be separated by race,” Moore said unequivocally in the video statement. “We acknowledge that this and other subgroups of students must improve, but our commitment is improved academic achievement for all students. As the superintendent of Flagler schools, I apologize for any disruption to our progress this has costs and I asked for your support as a greater community in moving forward. We need your time ideas and resources to address the performance needs of our students as a whole.”




The investigation is being conducted by Mike Rinaldi, who now heads the Office of Professional Standards. He was formerly an assistant principal at Belle Terre Elementary. The investigation will include interviews with all those involved in the decision that led to the assembly, including the principal, Donelle Evensen, and the three faculty members involved in the assembly, who have been referred to, without first names, as “Mr. Hines, Ms. Steed, Mr. Gabriel,” as Evensen did in a Tweet cheering on the assembly last week. All three faculty members are Black. Evensen is white.

A district spokesperson downplayed the difference between the written statement on Tuesday and the video statement today. On Tuesday, Moore only went as far as saying that “sometimes, when you try to think ‘outside the box,’ you forget why the box is there,” without apologies or anything close to the explicit denunciation of separating students by race. “While the desire to help this particular subgroup of students is to be commended,” she had said, “how this was done does not meet the expectations we desire among Flagler Schools,” a line that hardly takes the measure of the offenses parents saw in the assembly, or the objectification of students as instruments in the school’s attempt to avoid becoming a failing school.

The slide presentation shown the students included a slide headlined: “The Problem,” followed by a line containing three grammatical errors and referring to Blacks as the problem. The errors were not intentional or illustrative. They reflected the sloppiness and of the presentation’s organizers. Evensen, the principal, has not responded to an email inquiry for comment. She emailed parents of the Bunnell Elementary community.




But in another indication of the same disconnect that led her to approve the assembly in the first place, she appeared to apologize not for the fact that Black students alone were called out, but because she had not informed parents first, as if that were the prevailing problem: ” I want to assure you, there was no malice intended in planning this assembly. However, we failed to inform you, our parents and guardians of these plans. We realize we went against our long-held belief that this must be a team effort, with you being a key member of that team,” Evensen wrote. “Please accept my apologies. My promise to you is we will learn from this and be better. I have already spoken with several families concerning this event.”

She noted that parents or students could “speak with a member of one of our trained counseling teams,” which at least hinted at an acknowledgement that communications alone wasn’t the problem, but also pointed at the statement’s flaw: Evensen refused to address the problem–the segregation of students, not the students’ “problem”–earnestly, on its terms, head-on.

That aside, there have been no explanations from her or the district regarding a follow-up–or an apology–to the students themselves, though the superintendent apologized to parents and the community.

Moore concluded her 90-second video statement with a plea: “I appeal to this community to come together not just around what we don’t want to see, but what we want to see in our schools. I ask that you get involved in one of our schools, join community organizations that partner with the school district, connect with the Flagler Education Foundation on ways to mentor a student, volunteer, or a plethora of other ways you can contribute. Contact me or one of our school board members with your ideas. Again, I apologize to the specific families and this community and I asked for your support as we move Flagler forward.”

Click On:


  • The Investigation Reports: Donelle Evensen; Anthony Hines.
  • Bunnell Elementary Principal Evensen Resigns, Saying She ‘Certainly’ Does Not Deserve What’s Happening to Her
  • Sally Hunt Wanted to Censure School Board Chair For Going Off Script in Talk Over Segregated Assembly
  • Flagler Schools Have a ‘Subgroup’ Problem. It’s Not Blacks. It’s Not Even Students.
  • Flagler School Board Members Meet Behind Closed Doors to ‘Debrief’ Until Attorney Breaks Them Up
  • School Officials Forcefully Denounce ‘Segregation’ Assembly But Steps Ahead Are Vague Beyond ‘Conversations’
  • Bunnell Principal Donelle Evensen on Administrative Leave as District Faces Fallout of Segregated Assembly
  • Superintendent Lashakia Moore Issues Stronger Apology Over Bunnell Elementary’s Segregationist Assembly
  • The Principal's Tweet
  • The "Problem" PowerPoint
  • Black Students at Bunnell Elementary Are Told Of ‘Early Grave’ If They ‘Clown’ Around and Don’t Perform
Support FlaglerLive's End of Year Fundraiser
Thank you readers for getting us to--and past--our year-end fund-raising goal yet again. It’s a bracing way to mark our 15th year at FlaglerLive. Our donors are just a fraction of the 25,000 readers who seek us out for the best-reported, most timely, trustworthy, and independent local news site anywhere, without paywall. FlaglerLive is free. Fighting misinformation and keeping democracy in the sunshine 365/7/24 isn’t free. Take a brief moment, become a champion of fearless, enlightening journalism. Any amount helps. We’re a 501(c)(3) non-profit news organization. Donations are tax deductible.  
You may donate openly or anonymously.
We like Zeffy (no fees), but if you prefer to use PayPal, click here.

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. It’s a crime says

    August 23, 2023 at 7:09 pm

    Yes, you are sorry. A sorry excuse for a Superintendent who is black or “AA” as your teachers call their students. Just resign now and save us all the grief of you getting legally fired, therefore limiting your employment opportunities drastically.
    This is shameful, racist, cruel. There are not enough adjectives to describe your despicable behavior.
    What you and your teachers did is inexcusable.did not one person say “umm, I don’t think this is a good idea?”
    Goes to show that the environment from our leaders at our schools is corrupt.
    You made the National News for Christ Sake!
    Bravo ! I hope the NAACP is on their way !
    And for what it’s worth, I am a white male who is seriously considering his republication registration

  2. Maria says

    August 23, 2023 at 9:02 pm

    This is bull! If that had been a white faculty member facilitating this hypocrisy they would have been fired already. She should not be put in as our superintendent for poor choices.

  3. last past great idea says

    August 24, 2023 at 6:34 am

    I’m pretty sure Lashakia had nothing to do with this; the event occurred at a school under that school’s leadership, well let’s be honest, lack of leadership.

    Lashakia is just cleaning up the unfortunate mess of a few complete utter nimrods who, I think, should be let go of – asap – and maybe be made to undergo mandatory spelling and grammar classes before the lawsuits begin.

  4. Greg says

    August 24, 2023 at 6:53 am

    Haven’t read that people are fired yet? Maybe you should be the first. Get ready for the law suits that are coming.

  5. Resident says

    August 24, 2023 at 7:41 am

    You want ideas? Let’s see….first start with getting rid of the Superintendent, the Principle and any individuals who helped plan this fiasco. This shows how stupid they are. Can’t Flagler County do any better? You would think we’re back in the sixties again.

  6. No Problem says

    August 24, 2023 at 8:41 am

    I have no problem with what happened. Truth & reality hurt sometimes. Instead of the parents being outraged, maybe they should be helping their kids pass school. Something wrong here when it’s 4th & 5th grades……..

  7. Bill C. says

    August 24, 2023 at 9:55 am

    Are you saying the Superintendent knew about this? Are you saying she approved this? No where have I read that this assembly rose to the level of anyone’s approval above the Principal. I think you are overextending your blame. I do think that the burden is now on the investigators to return a recommendation of “off with their heads” for the faculty and even the Principal, but the Superintendent? Really?

  8. Fire them all! says

    August 24, 2023 at 10:43 am

    If one “grievous” typically white “parent” can remove a book for an entire school district despite the thousands of other parents that have no issue with said book(s), then surely the NUMEROUS family’s calling out this actual grievous issue should result in changes a majority support. Right? ……… Right? Or is it only straight white Christian family voices that matter?

  9. Da professor says

    August 24, 2023 at 10:49 am

    This is what’s wrong with our education system. Chasing numbers, falsifying numbers and statical compliance. Inspiring kids to learn and measuring growth should be the focus instead of state mandated testing and grading schools. The real reason some kids have lower test scores is poverty and single parent homes not race.

  10. Been There says

    August 24, 2023 at 1:44 pm

    Did anyone else see the news broadcast where they stated the children were told, “If you don’t raise your test scores you could end up killed or in jail in the future?”

    Are our teachers so scared by all the new threatening state legislation that not ONE of them stood up and said, “this is B.S.?”

  11. Bill C says

    August 24, 2023 at 2:13 pm

    Please note: Bill C and Bill C. (with a period) are two entirely different people.

  12. Bill C. says

    August 24, 2023 at 2:23 pm

    You have no problem because your view is myopic. The issues of race, division, and separatism are at the crux of this incident. The Principal and the three teachers poorly judged what method should be used to deliver the message. It was wrongly done. That being said, once reprimands and punishment is meted out the parents of the kids who are performing poorly need to address that issue. That is their part of the contract.

  13. Dennis C Rathsam says

    August 24, 2023 at 6:13 pm

    Here we go again… STRIKE ONE!

  14. It’s a crime says

    August 24, 2023 at 7:37 pm

    Hey bill c, this happened under her watch. Enough said. Is it her fault? Nope, but heads have to roll for this racist attack

  15. Linda Lou says

    August 25, 2023 at 7:07 am

    Sadly, I think you are pretty much correct. Without any ill intent, the folks who organized these assemblies just seem to lack judgment, good writing skills, and certainly a little “class.” This was a both simplistic and misguided approach to a very real problem. The parents who have raised objections seem to be pretty much on target. Parading high performers in front of the rest of the students? Heaven help us. I wouldn’t let these folks organize anything.

  16. Truth be told says

    August 25, 2023 at 3:22 pm

    They have more of a problem with teachers taking the time out to mentor and encourage black children than black children being ignored in Flagler county schools systems for generations.

  17. Kecia A Johnson says

    August 26, 2023 at 4:27 pm

    Maybe the teachers need to go to school. Tha inability to teach should be on them.

  18. The Geode says

    August 27, 2023 at 10:51 am

    Isn’t that their “PARENT” job? I get so tired of you thinking that raising, educating, and best interest of our black children should be the responsibility of “white people” or the “system” that we constantly complain about while depending on it. How come the REAL issues aren’t discussed instead of this nuance and victimizing shit you always do?

  19. Concerned Citizen says

    August 28, 2023 at 11:46 pm

    All are responsible. Leadership starts at the top.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

  • Conner Bosch law attorneys lawyers offices palm coast flagler county
  • grand living realty
  • politis matovina attorneys for justice personal injury law auto truck accidents

Primary Sidebar

  • grand living realty
  • politis matovina attorneys for justice personal injury law auto truck accidents

Recent Comments

  • Bob Zeitz on Metronet Contractor Punctures Flagler Beach Water Main for 2nd Time in 24 Hours, Again Affecting City’s Water
  • B on Metronet Contractor Punctures Flagler Beach Water Main for 2nd Time in 24 Hours, Again Affecting City’s Water
  • CrazyTown on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Mothersworry on Metronet Contractor Punctures Flagler Beach Water Main for 2nd Time in 24 Hours, Again Affecting City’s Water
  • Call me disappointed on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Atwp on Judge Gary Farmer, ‘Discriminatory, Offensive, Sexually Charged, and Demeaning,’ Fights Suspension
  • Larry on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • justbob on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Fernando Melendez on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Jim on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Jim on If Approved, Religious Charter Schools Will Shift Yet More Money from Traditional Public Schools
  • William Hughey on Mayor Mike Norris’s Lawsuit Against Palm Coast Has Merit. And Limits.
  • Kenneth N on Last of Palm Coast’s City Manager Candidates Withdraws, Clearing the Way for Pause and Reset Months from Now
  • JimboXYZ on Metronet Contractor Punctures Flagler Beach Water Main for 2nd Time in 24 Hours, Again Affecting City’s Water
  • Alic on Metronet Contractor Punctures Flagler Beach Water Main for 2nd Time in 24 Hours, Again Affecting City’s Water
  • aw, shucks on DeSantis Stands By Attorney General’s Defiance of Federal Court Order Halting Cops’ Arrests of Migrants

Log in